Teenage kicks: torture memos and a failure to connect

After a weekend when the blogs have been buzzing non-stop with discussion of the CIA torture memos, I want to ask – why do some commentators appear so eager to justify torture?

Not all commentators, by any means. Many patriotic Americans and friends of America the world over are sincerely horrified at the content of the torture memos. They want to see Osama bin Laden and his cohorts brought to justice but they totally reject the notion that a key arm of a nation's security apparatus should allow itself to sink into the mire along with the terrorists they're trying to capture.

But torture apologists are certainly out there. Here's what they generally argue. Roughly, torture is justified for three reasons: (1) it works – you get results that save lives; (2) it might work, so it's worth trying – you might save lives and so torture it's still worth trying; (3) it's actually "not torture" but some lesser form of "tough" or "enhanced" interrogation and though harsh it's still acceptable.

I don't want to spend the rest of this post rehearsing all the counter-arguments (you can find them in two minutes on any of the big comment threads) but suffice it to say that briefly they are: (1) no, torture doesn't "work", you just get mangled information as well as damaged bodies; (2) ditto; and (3) the deliberate infliction of physical pain or mental suffering is torture (which is abhorrent as well as illegal) and many supposedly lesser forms of mistreatment are clearly torture under a different name.

Instead, that question again: why do some people appear so keen to justify torture? It's not, I don't think, because they have a great deal of evidence to support their position. Those that say torture "works" are not able to wheel out example after example of major investigations cracked through the application of physical pressure. While the spectacularly extreme "ticking bomb" scenario (suspect apparently knows about a bomb, there's limited time before it explodes, it's vital to torture the information out of them) is constantly cited, you never actually get any credible examples of where "actionable intelligence" has been extracted from these situations that directly led to saving lives.

Without hard evidence the pro-torture camp are often betrayed as "moral relativists" operating on a wing and prayer. Torture is unpleasant but not as unpleasant as the people we're dealing with; this will hurt but will prevent much greater suffering; where we get it wrong it will be seen that we still did it for honourable motives; our cause is right, we are not sadists and deliberate killers like the other side.

Basically, lurking beneath all of this, I think, is a failure to see the human being beneath the hood. They just don't see the reality of the person strapped to a wooden board and made to feel they are drowning (in up to 12 gruelling, 20-minute long sessions, as we've recently learnt: Today programme, 8.50am item). Because we don't feel their pain or experience their terror it's somehow not actually that painful or terrifying. One commentator this weekend compared the content of the Justice Department memos to the CIA as no more than the rough play he'd had with his cousins when they were children.

Those that adopt a Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney-like bluff disdain for others' suffering ("I stand for eight or 10 hours why can't they", "it's just a dunk in water"-type stuff) are either disingenuous like them or simply failing to connect with the reality of what they're minimising. In all seriousness US Justice department lawyers were saying it was acceptable to deprive someone of sleep for 11 consecutive days – while all this time potentially combining other methods like slamming people into walls ("walling"), slapping them in various parts of their naked bodies, chaining them into painful positions, hosing them down with water, putting them in freezing cold rooms or allowing them only meagre amounts of liquid food.

Like the commentators who affect a Jack Bauer/Daniel Craig-as-James-Bond hauteur, you wonder whether any one of these highly educated legal experts had ever experienced even a fraction of the things they were signing off on?

Why the lack of concern? Televised torture and computer game gore probably do play their parts in de-sensitising people to the reality of suffering (real pain, real blood), but deep down I think the pro-torture camp is going beyond the teenage kicks of vicarious violence and almost wilfully turning a blind eye to abuse because it's for "our" cause, for "our" security. If it were ZANU-PF militia doing this to Zimbabwean farmers they'd be outraged; if it were an Iranian interrogator beating up an American journalist they'd be spitting feathers.

The torture memos reveal the dark heart of the "war on terror" as well as the self-serving, cold-hearted impulses that underpin the "tough" rhetoric of the torture apologists.

Meanwhile, the fact that President Obama has given a get-out-of-jail-before-they're-even-in-jail card to one and every CIA torturer is an extremely disheartening decision, one criticised as illegal by the UN's torture expert, and one that would presumably give heart to past torturers around the world who may now be sleeping more comfortably in their beds thinking that they're a bit less likely to ever face justice for their crimes.